When Thierry Gillier and Cécilia Bönström, the founder and creative director of the French fashion line Zadig & Voltaire, moved into their five-bedroom apartment in Paris, it was "brown and black" with "a lot of heavy, dark carved wood everywhere," wrote Lonny magazine. The 19th-century apartment had once served as the bachelor's quarters of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon's urban planner, and the man who made the capital's boulevards, like the Champs-Élysées, look so distinctive. Naturally, it was a very masculine-looking apartment. The stylish couple, who have a significant collection of contemporary art featuring artists like Basquiat and Damien Hirst, elected to paint most of the old woodwork white.
The apartment had a wealth of incredibly charming historic flourishes, like a "music salon with an ornately coffered and frescoed ceiling featuring baroque-style angels named after Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven," but required many careful restorations, according to Lonny. The frescoed ceiling had to be cleaned, and the floors, windows, and moldings all needed work. "Every element of the apartment was revisited—it's like it was redone, top to bottom," the architect Isabelle Stanislas of the Paris firm So-An, who has worked on several Zadig & Voltaire retail stores, told Lonny. "It was a job that fell somewhere between restoration and creation." Photos, below:
· Off the Walls [Lonny]
· All Printed Page posts [Curbed National]
· All Globe Trotting posts [Curbed National]
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